NC’s AI Solve-a-Thon Proved Students Are Ready. Are We?

We Put in the Work: The Byrd Brains on Solving Homelessness with AI

In this episode of Kinwise: AI Insights for Education Leaders, host Lydia Kumar sits down with three members of the Byrd Brains to learn about how they build the Jade Book.  Key Takeaways for Education Leaders -The most powerful solutions come from lived experience. Chris Butler experienced homelessness three times, including during COVID while sleeping in a car. That personal stake shaped how the Byrd Brains built the Jade Book. -AI hallucination is a real problem students can learn to solve. The team discovered their app was generating fake shelter listings and developed a systematic back-testing process to verify every resource before publishing.  -Collaboration across schools is possible. Chris attends a different school than his teammates and joined the team remotely through SparkNC. The team met in person for the first time only after making the top ten. Remote collaboration is a real-world skill students need to practice. -Students need more AI instructors, not just AI policies. Tremaine made the point directly: his school has one AI instructor, and that makes all the difference. Teachers who encourage AI use rather than ban it create entirely different learning environments. -When students are given real problems, they build real things. The Jade Book has already attracted interest from companies and organizations wanting to make it a real product.

Student-Built, Community-Tested: The AI App Connecting North Carolinians to Critical Resources

In this episode of Kinwise: AI Insights for Education Leaders, host Lydia Kumar sits down with Satviki and Anwita, the first-place winning team from the NC AI Solve-a-Thon, and their coach Nina Darnell, Spark Lab leader for Cabarrus County Schools. Together they built NC Connect Link, an AI-powered app that helps people across North Carolina find jobs, housing, food, healthcare, and legal aid in one place.  Key Takeaways for Education Leaders -They built for real people. Satviki and Anwita designed NC Connect Link for people who are stressed, in a hurry, and not necessarily comfortable with technology, adding natural language input, multilingual support, and typo handling based on real user feedback. -Customer discovery is a learnable skill. The team reached out to libraries, local organizations, school teachers, and administrators to test their app before the competition and kept iterating until the last minute based on what they heard. -AI was a teammate, not a shortcut. They used Claude and ChatGPT to debug code and think through problems. -Students don't have to wait to make a difference. As Satviki put it: "We don't have to wait until we're older to make a real difference. We can start whenever our curiosity begins." -The app is still growing. NC Connect Link has expanded from major urban cities to all of North Carolina, rural and urban, and the team is working toward an App Store and Google Play launch by end of summer.

NC’s AI Solve-a-Thon Proved Students Are Ready. Are We?

In this episode of Kinwise: AI Insights for Educators, host Lydia Kumar sits down with Vera Cubero and Matthew Mayo, the NC DPI leaders who designed and ran North Carolina's first-ever AI Solve-a-Thon. Together they built a statewide student competition where teams spent months identifying real community problems and building actual AI-powered solutions and what students produced exceeded every expectation. Key Takeaways for Education Leaders * The Solve-a-Thon was built around empathy. Students were asked to identify real problems in their communities. * AI literacy is the floor. While many schools are still debating whether to introduce AI, students are already building with it. The goal now is fluency: the discernment and human agency to use these tools responsibly. * Instructional redesign is no longer optional. If the end product is indistinguishable from what AI alone could produce, it's time to start evaluating the process. * When students are given real challenges, they exceed what we thought was possible. One student told his coach he had learned more in four months than in his entire school career.

Ethical Ed Tech: Priten Soundar-Shah on Slowing Down AI Decisions in Schools

In this episode of Kinwise Conversations in AI, host Lydia sits down with Priten Soundar-Shah, educator, philosopher, and author of the forthcoming Ethical Ed Tech, to challenge the question most schools are asking about AI. Instead of starting with "Does this tool work?", Priten argues schools need to build ethical reasoning skills first, drawing on a framework adapted from bioethics to help educators make values-driven decisions at every level. Key Takeaways for K-12 Leaders -Ethics is a skill, not a policy. Ethical decision-making requires vocabulary, heuristics, and protected time. -Classroom teachers are the most consequential AI decision-makers. Like doctors who know their patients, teachers hold relational and pedagogical knowledge no district policy can replicate. -Top-down policies produce compliance. Without educator buy-in, the result is checkbox behavior.  -Slow down to lead. Define your highest-priority problem before entering any sales conversation. Don't let vendors set your agenda.

Place-Based AI: Grounding Technology in the Real World

In this episode of Kinwise Conversations, host Lydia Kumar sits down with Steven Priest, Digital Learning Consultant at the Wyoming Department of Education, to dismantle the myth that rural districts are lagging in the AI revolution. Priest, a former agriculture teacher and principal, brings a unique "place-based" perspective to digital transformation, arguing that Wyoming’s high-trust, low-bureaucracy environments have allowed them to outpace national averages in AI policy adoption. Key Takeaways for K-12 Leaders -Agility Over Scale: Rural districts are leading AI policy adoption (56% in Wyoming vs. 31% nationally) because their smaller size fosters high trust and the ability to "fail forward" without excessive red tape. -Mission-Driven Adoption: AI implementation must be grounded in an organization’s existing mission and vision; without this strategic anchor, AI becomes a "shiny object" rather than a tool for progress. -The "Durable Skills" Currency: As AI handles more technical tasks, the value of human-centered skills, critical thinking, empathy, and adaptability, becomes the primary goal of modern curriculum design. -Unplugging to Connect: Strategic leadership in AI includes knowing when to disconnect. "Place-based AI" uses technology as a hook to ground students in their physical reality, fostering a sense of purpose. -Teacher Retention through Efficiency: AI’s greatest immediate value may be reclaiming 5-7 hours of teacher time per week, offering a powerful lever for addressing burnout and the educator shortage.